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How do we solve a problem like Iran?

This question dominates the news once a year and every politician, pundit, and foreign policy expert has an answer to it. Helpfully, they reduce their answers to a single phrase around the likes of "sanctions" or "war". Then something else happens in the world and Iran and its nuclear program fade from the headlines until next year.

And every year these solutions contain the same flaw: they are not part of an overarching strategy. They are tactics. Those who push them never fully explain how they will solve this Iran problem.

In December, Iran threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz if further sanctions were imposed on the country. So began the perennial debate. Should the West attack or negotiate harder? Perhaps apply even more sanctions? The recent murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist led to op-eds advocating targeted killings as the best solution to the Iran problem.

As with previous debates, few of those pushing these tactical policies put them in the context of a wider strategy. Few of them touched on the trade-offs and unintended consequences of their preferred one-phrase-solutions. We cannot come to an informed decision on what to do about Iran if the solutions are so underdeveloped.

The most underdeveloped is the call for war. It is not clear how military action would change the Iranian regime's view that a nuclear capability is essential to both its own security and that of the country. Those who push for an attack never offer a strategy that connects an airstrike with Tehran giving up a decades-old ambition. The assumption seems to be that if we blow stuff up then good things will happen.

The Iran debate is a spectrum: "negotiations" sit at the opposite end to "war". But negotiation has its flaws too.

One can argue that just as an attack on Iran would legitimize the regime, so could negotiations, as was the case with détente during the Cold War. The Israelis are particularly susceptible to this view, writes nuclear policy expert Mark Hibbs:

"At a time when Israel is bracing for a coming wave of democratic anti-Israeli sentiment from its newly-freed Arab neighbors, Israel will want to invest in a future Iran which, as in the past, was willing to live with Israel in peace. [That] would imply that Israel wouldn't be interested in a negotiated solution to the nuclear crisis that would legitimate Iran’s current rulers."

In the middle of the spectrum is the term "containment": applying restrained but continuous pressure against the regime until it yields to Western demands or is overthrown by the Iranian people. George F. Kennan devised containment as a way of avoiding war with the Russians and appeasing them, and many think that this is the best approach vis-á-vis Iran.

Both sanctions and targeted killing come under the rubric "containment" but they both have just as many trade-offs and indirect consequences as the extremes of the debate.

Though sanctions are seen by many as an alternative to war, they could lead to war if they are not more discriminating. Respected Iran scholar Gary Sick has warned that if the West completely shuts off the regime's oil revenues, they will lose the incentive to keep open the Straits of Hormuz. Any attempt by Tehran to close it would "risk a wider regional war".

The current debate was given further legs by the killing of Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan on 11th January. Is targeted killing the answer, as some op-eds suggest?

As with the one-phrase-solutions discussed above, "targeted killing" has unpleasant trade-offs and indirect consequences. Murders like that of Roshan are acts of terrorism: if the United States were to make them policy then how it talks about terrorism would need to change. Instead of it being "barbaric", terrorism would become a tool of statecraft

So how do we solve a problem like Iran? The short answer is that nobody truly knows.

President Obama commented in an interview recently that "this isn't an easy problem, and anybody who claims otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about." But if we are to find the right solution to the Iran problem, then the standard of the debate needs to rise considerably.

Aaron Ellis writes about foreign affairs for Egremont, Thinking Strategically, and others.